Ready and willing:
How an integrated media campaign boosted sales at Ready Honda
For Bob Redinger, president and general manager of Mississauga, Ont.’s Ready Honda, maintaining t he relevance of the company’s marketing efforts has always been top of mind. Working with Postmedia to create compelling custom content has enabled a digital marketing campaign, accompanied by traditional advertising, that’s spurred a significant increase in sales.
Redinger says that the campaign represented the right opportunity at the right time.
“We’d marketed before in separate campaigns with radio and newsprint and small- scale digital,” he says. “But I had reached a point in the business where I needed some fresh integrated marketing.”
Ready Honda was already a powerful brand in the Greater Toronto market, but the company’s Ready Power Sports division hadn’t fully lived up to its potential.
“This branch of the dealership sells snowmobiles, ATVs and outboard motors, but its primary focus is motorcycles,” says Richard Kazmirchuk, consultant, integrated media sales with Postmedia, who manages the campaign. “Bob represents five motorcycle manufacturers — Honda, Kawasaki, KTM, Suzuki and Yamaha. That’s an extensive product line under one roof almost unheard of in the industry.”
The campaign was designed to solidify the company’s strong position in automotive while building awareness of the motorcycle division and promoting each bike manufacturer it represents. The game plan included print, digital display, a new website, search engine optimization (SEO), custom article content and local search optimization.
“We have an incredible array of marketing tools at our disposal,” says Kazmirchuk. “But we focus on being consultants first and don’t try to upsell clients or make recommendations that don’t fit the objectives. Deciding which tools to use requires you to first fully understand the client’s company, including what it sells and to whom, to understand what KPIs should be impacted in order to drive the business. You then need to tailor the marketing campaign to what you believe will give clients the greatest return for their marketing investment.”
For Redinger, initiating the campaign was a leap of faith. He knew that his company website had become outdated, and he understood the value proposition of digital marketing. However, he wasn’t familiar with some of the tools now at his disposal, so part of the marketing consultation involved education.
For example, how quickly a website responds — measured in mere seconds — can make or break a user’s decision to learn more about the product and whether or not to do business. Kazmirchuk demonstrated just how long it took for pages to load on the existing Ready website and also how difficult it was for search engines to locate the site without SEO.
“We did a lot in a short time,” says Redinger. “But the time spent on our end wasn’t onerous. Richard made it easy by acting as the main point of contact through the entire process.”
The campaign kicked off in January 2017 and rolled out in stages. Digital and print ads came first. “The campaign was orchestrated to maximize our reach,” says Redinger.
“For example, we were shown where it would be to our greatest advantage to run newsprint banner ads for individual motorcycle brands, but where it was appropriate to run rotating banner ads featuring all the brands in digital.”
While print ads placed in the Toronto Sun targeted older bike riders, ads placed in the National Post helped maintain brand awareness for Ready Honda’s automotive line.
“We use unique phone numbers to track the effectiveness of our ads,” says Redinger. “The effect was immediate and measurable, which is gold in deciding marketing investment.”
The new website was launched five months later and further boosted sales. Redinger says he was impressed by the detailed reporting on who visited the website, basic demographic information about visitors, when they were visiting and what they did next. Ready had experimented with Facebook advertising prior to the campaign, but Postmedia’s ability to track social media engagement allowed the business to retarget prospective customers with compelling digital offers.
Postmedia also worked with Redinger to develop custom content around motorcycles in the form of four seasonal articles. Ready staff members were interviewed as subject experts, offering motorcycle tips to promote the dealership’s employees as trusted advisers who help customers make the right decision for their purchase.
The articles were published online on the Postmedia network and their reach was amplified using social networks.
“If winter was coming, we’d run an article on how to put your motorbike to bed for the season,” says Redinger. “There was no strong marketing pitch. In the long run, if the consumer trusts that information, they will eventually come in and buy, whether it’s service, parts or another bike.”
Kazmirchuk notes that monthly reports help him demonstrate how each element of the campaign results in engagement, sales or moving potential customers further along the sales pipeline.
“If we find that one campaign element is working better than another, we’ll adjust the campaign on the fly to ensure that the client receives top value for their money invested,” he says. “It’s not a case of set and forget.”
Redinger says t hat a stronger market boosted industry sales by about five per cent through 2017. Sales for both Ready Honda and Ready Power Sports added an additional five per cent above baseline during the same period.
“I attribute that additional increase to the integrated campaign and the way in which all of the elements worked to enhance each other,” he says. “While each element of the campaign fulfilled its promise, it was clear to us that doing all of them together was what drove that success.”